Welcome to the Beluga Brief, where we deliver data-driven insights to your inbox every week, spending our time in the crypto trenches and combing through thousands of crypto news feeds so you don’t have to.

As the Beluga Brief grows we’ll try out new content sections and schedules to find what is best for our readers — since Memecoins are all the rage these days, we’ve added a section to cover all the craziness in the market from Marc Andreessen-funded AI memecoins to the most profitable traders turning $100 into millions. If you have other suggestions for things you’d like us to cover, feel free to leave a reply on our Twitter!

Fundstrat Solana Report

Our partners at Fundstrat, a leading market strategy and sector research fund, have just released their report on the cutting edge technology being developed on the Solana blockchain. They have also been kind enough to make it available to Beluga Brief subscribers for free!

If you’re interested in a deep dive into topics like the slide above, you can download the full report from the link below. You can expect more reports like this from our partners in the future, so be sure to stay tuned if you’re interested in getting ahead of the market!

What happened today?

Bitcoin experienced a bit of a pullback today as it spilled from about $99,000 to a low of $92,500 however with the positive performance on alt-coins, you wouldn’t have known without looking. Whereas for most of this year a drop in BTC would mean alt-coins would dump 5x harder, we’re starting to see the opposite — something we’ve talked about in a few previous newsletter editions is how last cycle the real alt-coin run up happened once Bitcoin stalled out… could we be seeing the same thing once again?

This in combination with more weakness in major memecoins leads me to believe we’re entering the alt-coin season we’ve all been waiting for. Given the generally awful performance most coins in this category have had this year, there are a lot alts that have quite a bit of room to move. If you’re interested in how the Beluga Trading Wallet has positioned, you can always see our live holdings on the dashboard!

In an odd turn of events, it seems that none other than Justin Sun has come to save the day for Trump’s World Liberty Financial, investing $30M in the round and becoming by far the largest holder of $WLFI tokens. Justin Sun somehow finds a way to end up in every big crypto event or headline, so I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised of this very public investment. The question now is, will that boost in funding be enough to keep $WLFI going despite how negatively the market has received it?

Biggest Headlines

The Beluga intern has been hard at work gathering all the most important crypto news stories so you have them in one place!

The Majors

• Bitcoin’s march to $100,000 stalls. Here’s what’s keeping it below the milestone

• Ether: Why the second largest cryptocurrency can’t keep up with bitcoin

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Why MicroStrategy’s ‘Bitcoin bank’ plan will propel its market cap to $135bn, analysts say

• Solana’s monthly DEX volume surpasses $100 billion for the first time

Regulatory

• Congress’s top priorities this lame duck session

New Launches

• Avalanche9000 launches on testnet, over $40 million offered in retroactive rewards

Miscellaneous

• Pump.fun removes livestream feature amid reports of shocking videos

Memecoin Corner

The memecoin market has taken a significant downturn since last week, but to be honest things had to cool off at some point. We had reached a point where there were multiple coins going from 0 to $100M or more in less than a week, which of course is unsustainable. Adding to the problems, there was huge drama among the team behind the Eliza protocol, which has become the go-to backend for the majority of successful AI “agent” tokens. We also had the actual owner of Peanut come out and launch his own coin to try to gift some more money out of the space, despite having been sent $50,000 worth of tokens which he instantly dumped a few weeks ago.

One of the weirder pieces of drama has been the original artist of the “Chillguy” meme announcing that he would be trying to copyright strike the Chillguy memecoin, which currently trades at about $500M market cap… not very chill of him. After refusing to accept a donation wallet with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tokens, he now seems to be trying to produce plush versions of the Chillguy character to sell for $2 a piece in order to make some money. I have to say, if I had a choice between $2 plushies or $500k in tokens, I’d probably choose the latter.

Beluga Podcast Episode 22

The content on this site is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. While Beluga strives to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of information, there may be discrepancies when comparing our data to that of financial institutions, service providers, or specific product websites. Always consult with a professional before making any financial decisions.

Will McKinnon is the Head of Content for Beluga and has spent every day for many years trading coins. For that reason there are too many to name, however his largest holdings by a significant margin are Ethereum and Bitcoin. NFA DYOR